If you want something stylish a la Mac, try Lian-Li cases - this one in particular looks awesome. Would have bought one, if only it was available at the time.. I've got a PC-60 case now, and allthough it could have been quieter, it's an excellent case.
]]>Installing now - found out the onboard lan module wasn't on the install cd, but building the kernel from source works fine.... going to have to poke at everything else to get it working... onboard wireless (who needs this on a dekstop??)... sound (CMI9880?)... and then sata/sata raid stuff...
woot!
]]>As for the case + psu - you've gone seriously overboard.
yes well... without anything else, I turned on just the PSU, and it was utterly silent... I had to put my hand under it to make sure it's on...
and the case is just pretty - my girlfriend said it looks like one of those old-school cameros... which was funny...
]]>just to let you know what runs here
- CoolerMaster stacker (made my cpus about 5° cooler without adding more
fans) has lots of space and capability of BX if you need
- 2 Athlon MP2400+ (no it's not 64bit, but it's cheap and fast, SMP is just
very nice if you have many processes running)
- Antec 480W (a bit loud but runs fine)
- Tyan Tiger 2466-M4 (http://tyan.com/products/html/tigermpx.html)
no sound, no 1396, no usb2 - you needs card for that but maybe you have
from your old board
it's midrange in price and very solid, my luxury is a good keyboard
(http://www.logitech.com/index.cfm/produ … ENTID=9575)
and two LCDs
-neri
]]>As for the case + psu - you've gone seriously overboard.
I prefer the Antec SLK3700BQE for most of my builds. It is very solid, very quiet, not blingy, and comes with a 350w smartpower PSU. I've built machines up to a Athlon 64 3400+ w/ 6800GT using that PSU with no ill effects.
]]>Now I've decided to get an ASUS P5AD2 motherboard, but there's some confusion... the 925XE chipset is supposed to be better than the 925X, but the 925XE version of the mobo is consistantly around 5-10 USD cheaper? wtf?
As for hard drives, I'll grab a Hitachi 7K250... 160GB for $80-90, good deal and I have enough storage on my file server
There any soundcard I should shoot for over just a plain-jane Audigy 2?
I'll probably grab a 512MB PC3200 Kingston stick to start with... I can always buy more, it's cheap...
I was planning on grabbing a Geforce 6600 GT (they're around $175) and cramming a P4 530J (3.0GHz) in there (about $50 less than a 3.2GHz, deal!)
Opinions? Comments? Bitch-slaps?
]]>I just bought my new system and went through a lot of sites looking information about good PSU, but the case, i just went to stores to see them, i finally got this one:
http://www.apextechusa.com/proddetail.a … pe=&id=115
Im really happy with it, its a pleasure not to get cut with sharp edges and its almost 100% tool-less (the only thing that needs a screwdriver are the PCI slots, but i dont change that frecuently anything there).
Also it comes with a 400W power supply, though i changed it for a TOPower 420W one.
I went with an Athlon64 754 socket, because of several pros.
What type of motherboard are you looking for? do you need lots of SATA, AnyRaid, Firewire, lots of USBs, or just a motherboard with integrated video, a couple of SATAs, Raid and a few USBs?
I bought a DFI LanParty UT nForce3 250Gb. Its quite a motherboard. And there are others like the MSI K8N Neo Plat. or in the cheap side, there is the DFI K8M800 with integrated video...
]]>(I can't check now - just switched to 128 Kbps cable service. Fast enough, until you try loading an image-infested site during heavy load hours... )
]]>Jim
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